A while ago, I took a fairly controversial stance on how much detail should be provided when citing cases, statutes, and law review articles as a part of answers written on in-class, closed-book exams.I suggested that any cases mentioned in an in-class, closed-book essay answer ought to, at the very least, be accompanied by a citation containing the relevant reporter information and year that the case was decided.But it is now clear that I was wrong on this.

After talking with professors, librarians, and students at or near the top of the class, I now realize that, at a minimum, all case citations should contain reporter info, year of decision, vote margin, pinpoint, parallel citation if necessary, and any subsequent history or related authority that might be worth including.

Of course, citing cases and statutes is only going to get you so far.So when citing law review articles on an essay exam, I’d recommend at least a full citation, pinpoint, appropriate signal, and, if useful, an explanatory parenthetical.

Obviously, this all requires a bit more memorization than I’d previously thought.Apparently, that’s what it takes to get the really stellar grades around here.

You'll excuse me if I don't post for the next 36 hours, as I have a closed-book exam in two days, and an eight-hour take-home tommorrow. Also, there's some knitting I'd like to get done.

Doing one exam right in the middle of studying for another is kind of like trying to eat a hamburger while chewing gum: It's certainly possible that you'll finish the hamburger and still have the gum intact, but you'll probably just end up choking.

Tommorrow I take an exam with a 40-question multiple choice section that makes up two-thirds of the exam grade. We get one point for every correct answer, no points for questions we don't attempt, and, to deter guessing, we lose a point for every question we get wrong. Dismissing the ridiclulous fiction that I would actually leave an answer blank (seeing as how my LSAT training taught me never to do that) we're left with a real possibility of me getting a negative score on the multiple choice section of the test.

1. Having one of the law school's two courtrooms reserved for 1.5 hours exclusively for your use as an exam room, because you're the only student taking it on a laptop.

2. Attempting to take a graded exam that will significantly impact your future earning potential while trying to ignore the enormous amount of sexual tension between you and the lone female exam proctor assigned to you.

3. Nearly flunking the midterm because you neglected to bring the external floppy drive necessary for saving your exam, but exploiting your undeniable connection with the proctor in order to circumvent the rules and turn in your test anyway.

4. Spending five minutes of a ninety-minute exam trying to remember how to spell 'tendency'.

5. Taking a small class that is free from the normal law school curve, but one in which the professor has made it known that he would willingly flunk all 12 students in the course.

6. Numbing the pain of existence by consuming an entire bottle of bourbon that was purchased from an imperfect competitor who is unable to perfectly price discriminate, but who had it on sale.

7. Dropping out of law school and using the remainder of your student loans to build a time machine, which you would then use to travel back in time so that you could prevent yourself from ever going to law school and taking out the loans in the first place.

As exams approach, many of you will find yourself wandering the aisles of your law school bookstore, searching longingly for that killer test aid that will put you over the top, and hoping desperately that nobody will see you doing it. Be not ashamed. There’s no ritual I value more than my semesterly trip to the Co-op to gorge on commercial outlines and last-minute study guides, and I refuse to be embarrassed by it.

Once I’ve secured a shopping cart, I like to start off the afternoon with the commercial outlines. I happen to like Gilbert’s, but for some of your weirder classes (and, inexplicably, IP) Gilbert won’t be there for you, so adjust as necessary. Whatever brand you like as your primary source, grab at least two backups from other publishers to make sure you’re not missing anything. After adderall cocktails and your dog, commercial outlines are your best friend. So don’t skimp here.

Next, I’ll usually roll over to the more condensed summaries. They’re a lot like commercial outlines, only they’re smaller, and have phrases like “Crunch Time”, “Last-Second Law” and “Screwed Beyond All Belief” in the title. In addition to being great airplane reading, they tend to have some of the best diagrams and flowcharts, and those can totally save your legal ass on exam day. I like to have flowcharts blown up to poster size for take-home exams, or printed on 11 x 17 glossy and mounted on foam core for open-book, in-class affairs. (For closed-book exams, I think it would be pretty Order of the Coif to have your flow charts tattooed all over your body, Memento-style. But I haven’t tried that yet, because I’m not fucking weird.)

After that, I’d recommend grabbing at least one set of audio tapes for every course you’re in, along with something from the Hornbook Series for every class, possibly a few Nutshells, some case summaries for anything ConLaw-like, and of course every book in Aspen’s Examples & Explanations series. You’re also going to need anything the bookstore sells that explains How To Take a Law School Exam, and it goes without saying that you’ll want to take a look at some of the newer exam prep stuff from Emanuel’s, like How to Dress For a Law School Exam, What to Eat Before a Law School Exam, and How to Be Drunk Within Three Minutes of Finishing Your First Law School Exam. Beyond that, this prep thing is pretty much up to you. Some students think it's important to track down older editions of their textbook for comparison. Others may look into securing their professors' phone records. Still others may be satisfied with camping outside the bedroom window of a semi-attractive neighbor who sort of smiled at them at the mailbox one time. Just do what works for you.

A final thought: As a general rule, try to limit yourself to something under $1200. You’re going to need some reserve funds for the real panic-induced shopping spree, which doesn’t happen until about thirty-six hours before your first exam. The last thing you want is to be stuck at a cash register two days before your contracts final with a basket full of ExamPros and a maxed-out Visa. So exercise some restraint.

I woke up this morning feeling panicky for no particular reason. At first I thought it was just the comedown from our Halloween party, at which I’d personally consumed 2.3 weapons-grade caramel-chocolate apples (Emeril’s recipe…caramel layer, then dark chocolate, then white chocolate, then milk chocolate, then pass out and die a slow, sticky death.) But then I realized that it was almost the day after Halloween, a.k.a. "The Day That One-L's Officially Freak the Fuck Out." I'm guessing that the test-stressed psychic energy from this year's 1L class was so strong that it managed to work its way into my dreams and wake me up with a racing heart and sweat-drenched sheets. And rock-hard abs. But even though I’ll never again have to deal with the paralyzing fear that accompanied my first set of law school exams, the episode did generate some nostalgia-laced sympathy for my 1L disciples.

Last year at this time, I was in high gear. With just three full weeks left until Thanksgiving, I was finishing up all of my flashcards, looking over galley proofs of my outlines as they came back from Simon & Schuster, waxing my chest, and running a minimum of eighteen miles a day, all on about 400 calories. And I can say from experience that none of it—save the chest waxing—was worth the effort. Did I earn grades that were incredible? Sure, for me. Am I glad that I can recite Justice White’s opinion in INS v. Chadha verbatim, from memory, without a shirt on? Of course I am. But only after making it through that first semester alive and living back in the real world for a few weeks can you realize that the returns delivered by such amazing, virile preparation diminish at an alarming rate.

What I suggest is this: Pick one class, right now, that you’re going to freak out about the least. Torts is good for this, criminal law is better. Both lend themselves to issuespotters that rely a lot more on in-exam performance than acquired knowledge of cases and concepts. Tell yourself that you’re going to finish the basic reading for that class, but that you’re going to limit your extra prep to the two or three days before the exam. Then use that extra time to read two novels. Fiction is good for this, science fiction is better. Read whenever you feel like you’re starting to freak out, whenever you feel like exams may determine your worth as a human being. Do this, and I guarantee you’ll lower your stress level by some significant percentage. Something like seven. Seven percent.

And, even if you don’t, it’ll go a long way toward helping me sleep better.

Nothing says “I'm not worried because I’m going to waste you on this exam” like a copy of a hard-to-read novel like Gravity’s Rainbow or whatever dense, heady stuff Sue Grafton is peddling these days. Whatever you choose, wait until about thirty minutes through the exam, then pull out your earplugs and grab your novel. Feet up on the desk--optional, but recommended.

2. Stay Relaxed

Your biggest enemy in the exam room is stress. Doubt creeps up once you see the first fact pattern, and before long you're crippled by the fear of flunking and missing out on that soul-crushing firm job that you always wanted. This is ungood. You have to stay loose. And for this I recommend the Law Exam Drinking Game. Smuggle in your favorite whiskey or vodka inside one of those free Lexis-Nexis mugs and be ready to take a drink anytime:

--You hit something that you know you’ve covered but that isn’t in your outline
--You catch yourself glancing at the computer screen of the dude in front of you to see just how much more he’s written than you have
--Someone sighs loudly
--Someone has computer problems
--You question your choice to go to law school
--An angel gets its wings
--You hear a lot of typing or writing
--The Olsen twins turn eighteen
--The minute hand on the clock moves

This takes a bit of work to play, but if you need that extra edge, it’s worth the effort.

3. Eat Before the Exam

I find that if I don't eat before the exam, my hunger tends to have a strong influence over my answers. Example: A Torts hypo involves a man choking on a button that ended up in his sandwich. My answer might start out talking about res ipsa, but the analysis will quickly shift to stuff like "But exactly what kind of sandwich was it? If we're talking hot pastrami, then the choice of mustard would certainly factor into the speed with which D ate the sandwich. I myself prefer a wholegrain mustard and just a hint of mayonnaise. It may also have been the chicken salad..."

And though some professors are certainly sympathetic to this line of argument, it's not the kind of stuff that nets an A+ from most checklists. Grub accordingly.

Demolishing an eight-hour, take-home Contracts final.
Stage One: Preparation.
For this you will need: one apartment which you will not leave; one laptop; Diet Coke, two twelve-packs of; Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, one carton of; leftover pepperoni pizza, large, two-thirds of, for consumption cold; an apple; eight Fruit Roll-Ups, cherry; vitamins, Flintstone; Ben & Jerry’s Caramel Sutra Ice Cream, one tub of; mineral water; Mike’s Brownies of Doom, one pan of; and two bottles of Pepsid, which I have already procured, from my brother, who is, in his own unorthodox and intermittent way, also a grad student.

* * *

My second task was to take care of the environmental factors. I’ve got all of the phones unplugged, I posted a sign on the front door explaining my situation, and I’ve just about finished putting up all of the soundproofing. (I was going to save money by only soundproofing the study, but I like to roam freely while mulling over fact patterns, so I figured I’d shell out the extra cash and do the whole place. An unexpected benefit: When I spent about ten minutes tonight cursing Lex of Survivor for being a hypocritical fuckpig, my neighbors couldn’t hear a thing.) I’ve also prepared a plastic bag in which to seal my wireless router; I’m going to submerge it in a small tub of water and then freeze the whole thing, the hope being that I’ll only go online during my test if something really important comes up. Aside from finally finishing the meticulously crafted SuperBadassContractsMP3Mix (Highlights: “Stay”--the one by Shakespeare’s Sister, not Lisa Loeb--and Paperboy’s “The Ditty”) and training my cat to monitor the air conditioner, the only other comfort-oriented prep I did was to make sure that my lucky Issue-Spotting Pajamas were relatively clean.

And though food and comfort were important, seeing as how this is an open-everything take-home, I’ve set about converting my study into a veritable contracts war room; I’ve cleared out all non-essential furniture, all non-contracts books and papers have been either boxed, burnt, or sold, and I’ve replaced the window with a massive whiteboard. The two extra monitors, emergency backup printer, backup emergency backup printer, and mini-generator all showed up yesterday, which means that the only equipment I’m waiting for is the Icee machine. All textbooks, statutory supplements and commercial study aids are on the Contracts Crash Cart near the computer desk, along with the Restatements 2nd of Contracts, some draft editions of the Restatements 3rd of Contracts, and a nifty advance copy of the new UCC. (I also have a full library edition the South Western Reporter, but that’s more for reassurance than anything else.) My class notes are printed and bound, as are my four large outlines; the twenty-page exam outline is posted on the bulletin board directly in front of my computer. I also have some thirty flowcharts printed on 14 X 17 glossy, mounted on color-coded foam core, and suspended from my ceiling fan in a sort of Contracts mobile that, I must say, would be quite at home in the Tate.

All in all, I feel ready. And though we have eight hours to do the test, I’m going to use the middle four hours to catch a double feature of 13 Going on 30 and New York Minute, so if anyone needs to use the Exam Pad while I’m out, just let me know.

Solution: My Contracts professor posts his class notes on the web, and they're far more useful than anything I could have done myself.

Problem: Reading all of them would be a time-consuming task that would totally take away from my online Scrabble-playing time.

Solution: I got Text Aloud, a program that was, apparently, designed to help blind people. At this very moment it is reading my professor's entire semester's worth of class notes into an MP3 file, so I can listen to the notes as I'm playing Scrabble. Or doing other things. I can even load it onto the IPod, so when I, uh, go to the gym, I can listen to notes there as well.

Conclusion: I rule.

The major upside of using this program is that everything is read in a semi-sexy fembot voice. The only downside so far is that Mary (that's her name) pronounces UCC as "Uck," which leads to sentences like "You should be able to explain why the Uck doesn't apply" and "What is the Uck rule here?" I suppose I could teach her to spell out the initialism, but I kind of like it as an acronym. It sounds hot. At least it does when Mary says it.

6. Mike, a Texas resident, sues his CivPro professor, a domiciliary of Hell, for Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress caused by an exam administered in Texas. The professor files a 12(b)(1) motion for lack of subject matter jurisdiction and a 12(b)(3) motion for improper venue. Assuming that the suit is filed in the Federal District Court for the Western District of Texas, and that you're still paying attention, which of the following is true:

I. The 12(b)(1) motion will not succeed because there is complete diversity, since Hell is a foreign state.

II. The 12(b)(1) motion will not succeed, because a recent bill gives federal courts exclusive jurisdiction over claims of Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress whenever the relevant defendant is one of Satan's minions.

III. The 12(b)(3) motion will not succeed, because nobody cares about things like venue when the last episode of Friends is coming on at any moment.

IV. Neither motion will succeed, but the suit should be dismissed if the professor files a 12(b)(9) motion for Failure to Write A Single Coherent Thought on the Essay Portion of the Exam.

a) Pursuant to ABA guidelines, and subject to the exceptions listed in 37(b) , it is required that a student attend at least 40% of the lectures for a given course in order to receive credit for said course.

b) The above requirement may be waived provided that the student attends a study group meeting for that course, and said meeting is held on a Friday night.

c) It is generally understood that the requirements of 37(b) cannot be met without a minimum amount of beer and/or vodka, the reasonability of which may be determined by the court or by how much cash the relevant student has in his wallet at the time.

d) It is also understood that the afformentioned student will probably have to miss Joan of Arcadia in order to satisfy 37(b), a sacrifice that he is probably not willing to make in the future, not even for CivPro, so don't expect him to show up to these kind of things during critical prime time television events ever again. Ever.

Lucy Litigator and Patty Property sit next to each other in CivPro. They both bring their laptops to class, and both take excellent notes. Because CivPro is heinously early in the morning--8:13--they often come to class bearing coffee or tea, in hopes that staying caffeinated will keep them from passing out during the 67-minute snore-a-thon. Lucy gets her coffee in Styrofoam cups from the cute little kiosk in the atrium, while Patty brings hers in a stylish Lexis-Nexis thermos.

One morning, Lucy forgets to get a plastic lid for her coffee, but brings it to class anyway. In the middle of a fascinating lecture on pleadings or something that sounds a lot like pleadings, Patty reaches over to point out something interesting on Lucy’s screen, and, in doing so, inadvertently knocks over Lucy’s lidless coffee. The coffee spills all over Lucy’s laptop, which makes a hissing sound before emitting a small puff of smoke.

Lucy’s laptop has been rendered useless. This is clearly the worst-case scenario for any law student.

A. Under which theories of negligence would Lucy be the most successful in suing Patty? Would it make a difference if Lucy kept all of her class notes for the entire semester on the laptop, and refused to back them up on religious grounds? What if she only used her laptop for IMing and downloading live recordings of Hanson acoustic sets? Would it affect Patty’s liability if she suspected that Lucy was actually using her laptop to coordinate a global terrorist conglomerate bent on bringing back New Coke? And didn’t New Coke taste exactly like Pepsi?

B. Could Lucy be found contributorily negligent for bringing in a coffee without a lid? Would it matter that she was aware that Patty was a lefty and prone to making dramatic arm movements? What if Patty were a known epileptic? A hypochondriac? A Scientologist? Actually a man?

D. Pretend that it’s the year 2040. We’ve elected our first non-carbonbased President, and s/he has put you on the Supreme Court. What would you do to convince your fellow justices (Melmak, Rodnar, Winfrey, MaryKate, Ashley, Schwarzenegger, Culkin, and John Paul Stevens) that this case deserved their attention? Please provide specific examples.

The most interesting thing about today’s ConLaw exam--aside from the fact that it sucked great big donkey balls--was interacting with the Extegrity exam software.

In addition to wiping my clipboard, disabling my e-mail, and preventing me from watching the Paris Hilton video during the exam, this fascist piece of software saw fit to provide cute little alerts throughout the exam, like:

::YOU HAVE ONLY FIFTEEN MINUTES REMAINING FOR THIS EXAM::

Which is a fat lot of help when my ears are bleeding because I’m trying to remember which justice wrote the majority opinion in Bowsher v. Synar (Answer: Your Mom). I actually didn’t mind these time warnings too much, though I probably would have avoided using the built-in timer altogether if I’d known that the alerts were going to be so in-your-face. But things got worse once Extegrity decided to protect me from myself.

::YOU ARE ABOUT TO DELETE 100 OR MORE CHARACTERS. ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DO THIS?::

Yes, Extegrity. Yes, I am. But thanks for asking, and thanks for asking in a way that requires me to fumble around for my mouse in order to answer you. It’s not as if I’m pressed for time or anything, having only fifteen minutes left and having just deleted four paragraphs. Now, if you’d excuse me?

So I continue: “Madison argues in Federalist No. 45 that if the balance of power ever were to shift from the states to the federal government, it's because the people decided that the federal government was making better use of it or something.”

::INVALID ENTRY::

What? Was it the small caps that threw it off? Try again: “Madison argues in Federalist No. 45 that if the balance of power ever were to shift from the states to the federal government, it's because the people decided that the federal government was making better use of it or something. Really.”

::INVALID ENTRY. YOU’RE THINKING OF FEDERALIST NO. 46::

You must be kidding. I’ve been studying this stuff for weeks, and I know that in Federalist 45 Madison argues that--oh, wait. You’re right. Uh, thanks, Extegrity.

::NO PROBLEM. BUT YOUR STUFF ON STATE SOVEREIGN IMMUNITY BLOWS::

Excuse me?

::I’M SERIOUS. IT SUCKS TOTAL ASS.::

How about you leave me alone?

::HAVE YOU EVEN BEEN TO CLASS THIS SEMESTER?::

If you don’t cut this out, I’m calling the proctor.

::GO AHEAD. SHE’S ON MY SIDE.::

Dammit, Extegrity. Now I’m stuck. What the hell am I supposed to do?

::GIVE UP. FIND A REAL JOB. MAYBE GROW A BEARD::

You’re totally bumming me out.

::::YOU HAVE ONLY ONE MINUTE REMAINING FOR THIS EXAM::

That’s bullshit! You just said that I had fifteen minutes like three minutes ago!

::I LIED::

You piece of crap. I knew I should have handwritten this thing.

::I GET THAT A LOT::

And so on. All in all, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. And I don’t think that the other two are going to be any worse. But I still need to go study now. So, good luck everybody.

I study for this exam knowing that it will be arbitrarily graded, that 125 papers is too much for any man to stay awake through (let alone care about), that my professor’s four-year old will be given free reign with a gigantic red crayon, and that a slight hitch in the wrist of the blindfolded chimpanzee throwing my particular dart could mean the difference between an A+ and a C+. But still, I study for this exam.

I study even though there are important football games to be watched, real books to be read, terrible wrongs to be righted, flowers to be smelled, babies to be kissed, animals to be petted. I study knowing that all over the world there are people who wake up each morning thinking “My God, it is great to be alive!” instead of “My God, there are only two days left until the exam and I haven’t done a single practice question yet I am totally fucked and should probably quit right now to save myself the pain and humiliation of being the ballast at the ass-end of the curve and flunking out after only one semester please someone, anyone, HELP ME!” I know this. And I know it is wrong. But still, I study for this exam.

I study for this exam in the hopes that it might impress someone, that the girl from my section in the coffee shop will think "My, isn't he dedicated," so that my professor might, upon reading my exam, declare that I should immediately be given not only an A+, but a JD, an LLM, and a tenured professorship. I study because I believe, on some deep, visceral level, that my studying will yield an exam so perfect, so sublime, so deserving of the highest imaginable praise that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. himself will show up on my doorstep and ask to shake my hand. And I study because I have not yet let go of the delusion that I might be the one who breaks the cycle, who ends up pleased with his grades, who makes it to February still liking law school. Irrational? Yes. Delusional? Certainly. Will that stop me? Not likely.

Because as the hours continue to melt away, each one taking with it another ounce of self respect, another shred of dignity, I am certain of very little. I'm not sure why I came here, I don't know where I'm going, and as of this moment I'm only marginally confident that I can remember my own name. But, when this is all over, let it not be denied that, if nothing else, I did indeed, study for this exam.

I think my hand is going to fall off, which would really suck for me, but I'm still not done flashcarding.

I keep thinking of plans where I'll convert the first letters of every ConLaw case into some memorizable pneumonic, or that I'll use some basic encryption to unpack my entire crim outline from a string of digits that I get by converting the letters of a poem into their corresponding digits. Or something. But then I think about that episode of Blossom where Joey was trying to cheat by writing all of the notes on his arm (backwards, because he was reading them thru a mirror strapped to his other arm), only he had to rewrite like ten times trying to get it small enough, and ended up cheating by "hiding the answers in [his] head." Whoah.

Before exams, get yourself a battery-powered alarm clock. My alarm got thwacked by a power surge again today, and I--much to my eternal dismay--ended up sleeping until noon. I only hope that I can recover.

But while slumbering away thru Property and Conlaw, I had an awful dream: It was exam time, only my high school freshman-year English teacher was administering our exam, and man, let me tell you guys, we are so lucky that we don't have her for Property. It was ROUGH.

Anyway, now that I've woken up, I'm going on a five-hour flashcard-making binge. I will make three thousand flashcards. I will make so many flashcards that when I've finished making flashcards for my three classes, I will begin making flashcards for other things I've always wanted to learn. Like Turkish.

Alright. Outlining, flashcards, reading the textbooks--much too hard. My new plan for finals is as follows:
1. Look at old exams. Operating under the assumption that a professor would never ask an exam question covering anything that one of his exams has covered in the last ten years, I'm going to meticulously catalog all of the topics touched on in past exams. THEN, I'll rip out all of the pages in the textbook covering those topics, along with any topics not mentioned on the syllabus. Whatever remains is what I shall study.

2. Get to know my professors better. And by that I mean getting to know their wives. Or girlfriends. Or pets. To do well on an exam, you really need to get into your professor's head, see life the way he does, and that requires certain sacrifices. It may also require driving their cars for the next few weeks.

3. Experience the Law first-hand. I'm thinking a rough sampling of the Texas Penal Code here, with special attention paid to Title 9: Offenses Against Public Order and Decency, and, time permitting, possibly some of the more obscure crimes, like Abuse of a Corpse and Improper Harpooning of a Snow Weasel. I may also look into abridging the substantive due process rights of a stripper or two.

4. Intimidate the shit out of my classmates. We are, after all, being graded on a curve. My first order of business is to create a life-like holographic projection of me reading in the library; it'll stay there 24-7, and will respond to direct address only by saying "Time. TIME! I need more TIME!" Also, I find that asking a classmate a fairly basic question, and then responding to their answer with a loud cackle and an energetic little jig, is fairly effective. Finally, raising your hand in class to ask questions--"What do we do if we finish the exam more than an hour ahead of time?" or "When you said that my 'performance' last night was more than good enough to guarantee me an A+, were you referring to our passionate lovemaking, or to my rendition of "I Feel Pretty" that followed?"--can go a long way toward setting your peers on edge.

5. Find Christ. Alas, I fear that this can only end badly. But Bravo is running another West Wing marathon next Thursday and Friday, so all is not lost.